I established this site to continue my work as a professional staff member of the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the 9-11 Commission. I joined the staff of the Joint Inquiry, and then the Commission, for a specific reason. I was a witness to the immediate aftermath at the Pentagon site; my office in Crystal City faced the building. As a career intelligence officer, military and civilian, I wanted to know more. That quest continues.
On the Joint Inquiry I served on the “Other Agency” Team. Teams were dedicated to three specific organizations; the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Another team examined policy and history leading up to 9-11. My team, then, had a very large plate–the Department of Defense, less NSA, but including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the, then, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office; the Departments of Energy, State, Treasury and Transportation, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); and the Secret Service. Our mandate was to look at intelligence issues; we did not examine in any detail the actual events of 9-11, itself.
On the Commission I served on Team 8; our task was to look at the events of the day in the sky outside the airplanes. A different team looked at the airlines and events inside the airplanes. Our focus was on two specific organizations, FAA and NORAD and its components, specifically the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS). We established the essential facts of the day and told our story as “We Have Some Planes,” Chapter One of the Commission Report.
Both the Commission and the Joint Inquiry operated under tight time constraints and there was simply not enough time to do everything we wanted to do. With the recent and continuing release of Commission files I have the opportunity while things are still reasonably clear in my mind to revisit my work, hence the title of this blog.
My resume submitted to the 9-11 Commission contains this handwritten notation “NORAD issue–he did ‘Bros to Rescue’ [Brothers to the Rescue] issue.”
There is a short feature article about my Joint Inquiry Staff work in “MINES, the magazine of Colorado School of Mines,” vol. 93, no. 2, Spring 2003, page 16. The article is in PDF format and can be accessed via the result of this Google search.
Miles Kara